Anyone had a homebirth with a tiny house and a toddler?

[Secondtimelucky]

I am 15 weeks with no. 2 and after a truly horrible OP birth with no. 1 where I feel I was horribly mismanaged by the midwives (long story, but for example, forced onto my back for periods of continuous monitoring when they knew lying down was agony, left alone for hours, etc) I would really like to consider a homebirth next time.

However, my house is tiny. There is one front room, which the front door opens straight onto. You have to walk through it to reach our bedrooms and the (downstairs) bathroom. This is the only room big enough for a birth pool.

We don't have any nearby family who could whisk DD away for the duration, so we would probably looking at a patchwork of DH looking after her in the early stages (TBH, I don't really feel I need/want him standing beside me from start to finish. I kind of went into myself last time and he felt quite redundant) and friends/neighbours later if necessary. Will be hiring a doula too. Am hoping like hell it's one of those "went into labour at 10pm, born by 6am" jobs but obviously have to assume not. Do you think it's workable to have a homebirth if people need to potentially to and fro a bit through where you might be?

Of course, going to hospital has its own complications on the childcare.

Anyone done this successfully?

I had a homebirth in quite a small flat and it worked really well. I was a doula for a couple with a tiny all open plan flat and a 3 year old. They also had their mother staying!

I was worried there just might be too much going on and she wouldn't be able to feel cocooned and private. But we found a way to move bookcases, screens etc so that the area round the pool felt private (we planned this in advance btw).

Their DD was looked after by her mother and Dh at first and then went to the upstairs neignbours shortly after I arrived - she came back about 1.5 hours after the birth to meet her little sister.

I think this is totally workable and a great idea after your first experience - you'll just want to make good plans.

I'm biased but having a doula is a brilliant idea - you can work through stuff from your first birth with her, make plans for this one, be supported in your choices as well as during the labour itself. It also means there is someone else there to take over if your DH is taking your DD to neighbours/answering the door to midwives etc.

You might want to check out your local homebirth group (see www.homebirth.org.uk for details) - they will have lots of ideas for how to make a homebirth work in a small space and you might want to make sure your doula has plenty of homebirth experience.

No idea about home births, but I had a similar first time experience (long, mismanaged, intervention, horrendous)...and I had my 2nd in a dif hosp, MLU type thing...but anyway, the second was a "went into labour at about 3.30pm, baby born by 7.15 pm. 3rd was even better, 11.30pm, born at 2.25am. So you might easily have a quick one.

Good luck with the plans.